


Only Fools Rush In

by PotterheadAvengerDemigod



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Falling In Love, First Love, Gen, Kinda, Leta's POV, Love Triangles, Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Spoilers, Romance, Romantic Angst, SPOILERS for Crimes of Grindelwald, Spoilers, Unrequited Love, kind of, like major spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 15:52:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16621901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PotterheadAvengerDemigod/pseuds/PotterheadAvengerDemigod
Summary: Leta Lestrange is a fool. But this friendship wasn't something she would trade. Not for anything.





	Only Fools Rush In

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Can't Help Falling In Love by Elvis.
> 
> SPOILERS AHEAD:
> 
>  
> 
> Okay, I didn't want to put this in the tags in case it implied anything to anyone, but canonical character death in this fic!

Leta Lestrange cannot help loving Newt Scamander.

This is a truth. This is the truest truth about Leta Lestrange that anyone will ever know.

Leta Lestrange lives a life of lies. She lies about her family, she lies about her father’s love, she lies about her mother’s death. She lies about her missing little brother.

Her life is nothing but false pillars built on crumbling foundations, and Newt Scamander is the only bright spot in it.

He has been a bright spot in her life since they were partners for a Care of Magical Creatures project in third year, and she’d scoffed at the bright-eyed, air-headed boy with too messy hair and too long limbs, who tripped over thin air every five minutes but cradled a baby bird in palms that never trembled.

She’d mocked him for being such a stereotypical Hufflepuff that even the other Hufflepuffs didn’t like him, and he’d simply smiled and showed her the baby chick that had fallen from its nest in the castle’s eaves.

Somehow, between arguments and nights spent poring over books in the library, they become friends.

Their friendship carries on through thick and thin, through Leta hexing people in the hallways and running from McGonagall, through Newt getting caught with smuggled creatures and put in detention.

And in their fifth year Leta looks at Newt, and sees and angled jaw and sharp cheekbones, the remnants of baby fat still clinging to his face, and she thinks, _oh, he’s rather good looking, isn’t he?_

Then she freezes, because she’s not supposed to have fallen for a boy like Newt.

Newt Scamander is kind, and good, and does what he does not because it’s what people expect him to do, or because it would help him gain something. Newt Scamander does things because they are _right,_ and he’s the only one Leta has ever known like that. He is the best person she has ever known, with a big brain and an even bigger heart, who smiles like the rising sun at every creature big or small. He is absent-minded and curious and would sooner maim himself than see any creature harmed, and Leta is _enchanted._

But Newt Scamander is also an outcast, labelled strange, and weird, and no one really likes him. He is not a social climber, he is not well-liked, and he will probably never hold a job of high position.

Newt Scamander has nothing going for him but magical skill and a pureblood heritage. And a Lestrange, no matter how reluctant of one, can never marry someone of such little status.

Her father would rather see her dead than married to someone like Newt.

But even that wouldn’t have stopped her -her father’s approval has never stopped her, not truly- not if she _really_ wanted something. But Newt had never seemed interested in romance. She didn’t think Newt would ever get married, really. He was far too enamoured with his creatures, far too in love with the world of beasts to fall in love with her.

So Leta smiled, and called him by his family name to hide her heart, and hardened her walls even as Newt showed her ever more fascinating sides to himself.

She falls deeper and deeper every day, until one day an experiment goes out of hand, and Leta can only watch in despair as Newt steps forward and shoulders the blame. She watches him admit to a fault that was not his, and watches as the headmaster frowns and delivers his verdict.

Expulsion. And then Leta doesn’t seen Newt again, not for years, but every so often she gets a letter from him about the new creatures he’s found, written on crumpled, inkstained parchment, like he couldn’t wait for the ink to dry before folding it. Sometimes he encloses little pieces of creatures he’s been working with, a shed dragonscale, or a bit of occamy shell, and Leta keeps those in a little jewelry box along with the rest of his letters.

It’s after graduation that she first meets Theseus Scamander, when she’s still in her first month of a Ministry job, and she sees a familiar head of reddish-brown hair and a tall, lean stature striding through the halls. The hair is too neat, the posture too confident, but Leta doesn’t think about that before she’s already running forward.

It’s only when she’s already grabbed a bony shoulder that she realises her mistake.

The confused smile that greets her is unfamiliar, and the narrow slant of eyes is wrong, but the same bright blue sees right through her, and her heart skips a beat.

“I’m sorry,” a low, velvet tone says, and, Merlin, even the voice is similar. “Were you looking for me for something, Miss…”

“Lestrange,” she replies, after a moment’s silence. “I apologise, I thought you were someone else.”

“Miss Lestrange,” the man says, and his smile is genuine now. “Ah, you must be my brother’s old friend- he’d spoken about you a lot, before he left home on his adventures.”

His… brother? Leta has never really _had_ friends, the only one she’d really called one- “Newt! You’re Newt’s brother?”

“Theseus Scamander, at your service,” the man -Newt’s brother- says with a sweeping bow. “Perhaps you would care to join me for lunch? It would be nice to get to know the woman my brother used to speak about with such fondness.”

Oh, he _is_ charming, far more than Newt would ever be, but Leta’d always found a strange sort of appeal in clumsy words and shy mannerisms.

But she smiles, polite and well-mannered like she’d been raised to be, and says yes.

One lunch turns into two, and two into four, four in eight, until Leta wakes up and realises that she’s spent more years with Theseus than she has with Newt.

But still Leta sees wide blue eyes where she should see narrow, still sees a messy, overhanging fringe where she should see neatly combed back hair.

And then Theseus proposes, and Leta smiles, softly, and says yes.

Leta Lestrange settles, because she will never have her first love, and Theseus Scamander is not a bad man. He is kind, and caring, and she knows he loves her. Her father will not say no to this match up, even if he were alive to object.

Because Theseus Scamander is well-liked, popular, young but talented, already the head of the Ministry of Magic’s Auror Department at such a young age, and he is everything that his brother is not.

Most people would not call marrying Theseus Scamander _settling._

And Leta loves him, she truly does, but not as she loved Newt, not as she _loves_ Newt. But she will be happy with Theseus, and Newt is simply a hopeless dream, a far away wish that will never come true, and Leta smiles and accepts.

Because she will not be unhappy with Theseus, and above all, she will not lose Newt. _(She is marrying into his family, after all. Just not the way she'd ever thought she would, back when she was young and hopeful and naïve.)_

And then Newt comes back to Britain after his trip to America, after his face is plastered all over the Daily Prophet, and Leta has to laugh, because that truly is the Newt she knows. To get so caught up in saving innocent creatures that he would get thrown straight into the midst of a disaster, and still focus on nothing but a creature’s wellbeing.

Then, a year later, she comes to inform him that the Ministry is ready to see him for his hearing, and finds him on his hands and knees, teasing that little Bowtruckle that had followed him all the way from Hogwarts, and she stifles the laugh caught in her throat.

Thirteen years she hasn’t seen him, and he hasn’t changed a bit.

Fast forward a few days, and she’s Paris with Theseus, back in her family’s home country. She heads down to the Ministry’s records, and she sees Newt once again.

Or, well, more accurately, she sees Newt’s little Bowtruckle and finds him, clinging to the side of the records shelf beside a strange woman that Leta only has the vaguest recollection of seeing in the news. She’s an Auror, Leta thinks, one of MACUSA’s. But how Newt knows her, Leta has no idea.

But then they’re running for their lives from the matagots, and Newt’s ushering them all into his case, and Leta sees the newspaper cutout of the woman beside her stuck to the lid of Newt’s suitcase.

But she doesn’t have the time to think about what it means before Newt is barrelling out on the back of a _Zulu,_ and _where in Merlin’s name had Newt found a Zulu,_ but when she finally stumbles out of Newt’s case they’re in the graveyard where her family’s tomb is.

And Leta sees the gentle way Newt treats the woman beside her, the softness in his eyes mirrored only by that of what she sees when in Theseus’s eyes when he looks at her, and Leta _knows._ She was wrong. Newt _could_ make room in his heart for both his creatures _and_ a partner- how could she have thought otherwise? Newt was kind and humble and had so, _so_ much love to give, and she can’t believe she’d ever thought what she’d thought. And Leta feels her mistake tearing at her heart like the claws of a griffin, and it’s too late. It’s _far_ too late.

She’s engaged to someone else, and Newt is… Newt’s heart is already taken.

It’s okay, she tells herself, even as she descends into the darkness of her family’s tomb, Newt and Newt’s… _friend_ at her side. It’s okay. She’s happy with Theseus, she really is, and Newt… She would give her family’s fortune to see Newt happy. And Newt _is,_ even with the terror of this night and the threat of Grindelwald looming over everyone’s heads. She sees it in the softness of his eyes and the gentleness of his touch.

So she buries those feelings once again, and makes herself strong.

Then there’s the mess that is the rest of the night, and there’s Grindelwald, and his charming, _charming_ words, and then there’s blue flames and she sees her fiancé and his brother side by side, marked by flares of orange where there was only blue before, and she sees the way Aurors and non-believers alike disintegrate under magical fire.

And she sees how Newt and Theseus are slowly overwhelmed. Both Scamander brothers are forces to be reckoned with, magic and skill and talent, but neither of them are a match for the darkest wizard of their time.

And she does the only thing she can, the only thing that will see the two men she loves safe.

_“Grindelwald!”_

She calls his name, voice made heard over the crackle of flames, loud and sonorous and echoing, and she sees the dark wizard pause in his maniacal murder.

“This one I believe I know,” is what the wizard says instead, mismatched eyes glinting with reflected fire and unwavering confidence. "Leta Lestrange... despised entirely among wizards. Unloved, mistreated... yet brave. So very brave."

And she takes his words, understanding and comforting and so, _so_ cutting, and hides them behind a blank façade. She takes his hand, when he reaches out, and lets cold fingers slide from hers as he turns away.

Her eyes meet Theseus’s, meet Newt’s, and can’t help the shout that bubbles from her throat. ( _I love you.)_ She barely knows who the sentence is meant for, but her gaze lingers on Newt’s where they slide past Theseus’s, and then she turns back to those blue flames, to that retreating back.

She has made her choice. She has chosen her side.

 _Avada Kedavra._ The spell is whispered, unheard over the chaos of burning and death, but Grindelwald spins and deflects, and Leta has only a moment to pray, to hope that those men that she loves have wrestled free from dark clutches, and then all she knows is pain.

Pain, and then oblivion.

**Author's Note:**

> [My Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/_dreamdweller/)  
> Pop over and say hi!


End file.
